Wednesday, 24 February 2016

So I made a game

So I made a game where the point is altruism. Seriously, your character is a demigod, doomed, yes, but unable to be beaten. There's no point in self-actualisation; your character is already about as far as you can go on that road. No, the struggle, and the point, is in making a difference in a larger sense. It lies in freeing the slaves, standing as an accusation against the horrendous human sin we call “empire” and getting people off the land when it sinks, when the bombs fall and the meteorites hit and the land breaks in two. You fight a harder battle. Heroism is in who you save, because the lot of your hero is, as is the way of heroes, to conquer the armies of the world and to die in the end of the age.

And I made a game where there are no monsters. There are only fallible people and animals following their nature. Sure, some of the greater villains might even call themselves monsters, but one thing I've learned is that when you call yourself a monster, you only use it as a perverse badge of pride, as a way to hide from the true banality of your failings. Because the greatest crimes – empires, institutionalised slavery, genocides – they're a function of smallness. They're failures of imagination, failures to be better. You can be better. Here: you know what's going to happen, you know when you're going to die; what will you do with this?